Well thank you for clearing that up, JasoninPoland!
You had me wondering there. You see, I'm half Polish, by blood/geneology on my mother's side.
My grandmother Felixa was from Warsaw; my grandfather Stanislaus was from Krakow. They came to the United States in 1913. Together, they raised a family of seven children — two boys and five girls — who above all else they wanted to be Americans first and foremost.
Which in a certain way had regrettable consequences (from my POV) in that the Polish language, culture, and cuisine was not transmitted to my generation by my Mom or my aunts and uncles.
Of these seven children, four served in World War II: my uncles Joe and Teddy — U.S. Army, European theater; and my mother and her sister, Ann, who enlisted in the U.S. Navy and served as nurses in the Pacific theater, including in POW camps with snipers loitering about and shooting Navy nurses on nightime latrine calls.
My mother is the last survivor of that first generation of Polish Americans. She will be 91 on her next birthday, this coming October 16th.
Every last one of them, however, had a greater love and appreciation for the values which made this country great than you do.
I am proud of my Polish heritage; but even more, I am proud of the thorough acculturation to American values, traditions, and heritage that has constituted the history of my mother's family. Those people knew more about America, her fundamental values, and the price to be paid to secure her liberty, her greatness, than you do.
It always makes me so terribly sad to hear about the love of their newly-adopted country shown by people such as your grandparents, your mom, and your aunts and uncles, and then to hear that so many of them are no longer living among us. With their passing we lose a unique and wonderful part of American history that can never be recaptured, and that isn’t being taught to today’s youth.
Please wish your mother a very happy 91st birthday next week from me! God bless her! My dear Dad, who passed away seven years ago this month, would have been 91 this year also, had he lived.
I have always believed that the best way we can honor our parents and other family members who are no longer with us is to exemplify those characteristic of theirs that they would have wanted us to embrace, and to 'continue' -- kind of like the passing of a baton. That is the stuff of which genuine 'legacies' are made. And betty, you do them proud!
~ joanie